At heart, the search engine’s role is to:
- Understand the world’s knowledge
- Match it to user needs
- Instantly
The inspiration for better optimisation
In Search, Answer and Generative Engine optimisation we must consider the engines’ evolution, noting their successes and failures as platforms to bring value to their respective customers.
The efforts meant to unfairly over-represent a website to this audience instead of becoming more naturally aligned with the underlying purpose of the Engines are, at best, a waste of time for everyone involved.
Sergiu George
The methodology behind how Search Engines govern their rankings have been refined through tens of thousands of micro-iterations spanning multiple decades. However, the core philosophy established by that first handful of visionaries and reinforced by Google in particular – remained relatively intact. The most accurate and wholistic way to define SEO is by reverse-engineering how a search engine is able to direct a user to a website in response to a keyword.
The User, the Search Engine and the Website
While a user only sees the search input field of a search engine and the resulting search engine results pages (SERPs) in response to a keyword they type in, search engines rely on a number of parts to make this possible.
- At its core, each Search Engine has its own Index of all the publicly-available landing pages on the World Wide Web.
- The Search Engine Index is built by bots and is employed by a Search Engine Algorithm to rank the indexed landing pages as part of Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs).
- SERPs comes back in response to a search engine user typing a keyword in the search input field and may additionally be influenced by user characteristics (i.e. location, browser language) or user interaction habits (i.e. search history).
- To build and maintain a comprehensive and up-to-date Search Engine Index, the search engine bots follow hyperlinks from web page to web page across the entire World Wide Web on a regular and ongoing basis in order to:
- Decode and index the semantic content on every qualified page
- Asses the effectiveness of the technology that powers the content
- Register the relationship between the interlinked pages